Stay-at-home dads aren't really a mystery. They're not wrapped in riddles. They shouldn't be an enigma. They are, in fact, legion. A small, undermanned legion, to be sure, but growing in strength each year. If a modern mystery attends the dad who turns his back on full-time paid work for full-time baby wrangling, it's his complete absence from this week's election barney over paid parental leave.

Noted tax-and-spend socialist Tony Abbott proposes to rake billions of dollars from big business to pay for every Australian mum to stay home on full pay for six months after dropping her bundle.

Meanwhile, the tight-fisted scrooges of the ALP would condemn the nation's lactating heroines to struggling along on a miserly welfare scheme of such wretched parsimony that it must surely scare thousands of young couples into never having sex again.

The founding of the Platform for European Fathers (PEF) was welcomed at the ‘European fathers’ congress’ in the European Parliament that was organised by the Greens/EFA on June 28, 2011 in support of paternity leave.